Apple Patents Wireless Adapter For All those Dock Connectivity Woes

Still sore about needing to buy an adapter to get your iPhone 5 working with your old accessories, or, worse, finding out that even with that adapter, your accessories still don’t work? Well, there’s no getting around that first one, but for those in the second camp, you might have some recourse. Maybe. Someday.

Apple has patented a wireless adapter that would allow Lightning-equipped Apple devices to work with older, 30-pin accessories. Of course, that’s still an adapter you’ll need to buy (if it ever becomes available for sale), but the device’s design does allow it to circumvent incompatibilities that the current Lightning-to-30-pin adapters suffer from. Another little tidbit about the adapter is that it will be able to decide which accessories to work with – essentially, Apple will be able to design the adapter so that it doesn’t work with unauthorized Apple accessories made by companies that haven’t paid their royalty dues to Apple before shipping their product.

This is just a patent, not a real adapter. There’s no way of telling whether or not this will become a real wireless adapter in the future, or when that will happen. Not having to deal with the current unsightly adapter would surely be attractive for some, and I’m sure there are many unhappy iPhone 5 owners who are now stuck with useless, but otherwise perfectly capable of functioning, accessories. That said, this is a right now problem. It’s hard to say that Apple will go through with this, when they could probably just as easily sit back and let iPhone 5 owners buy up new Lightning-friendly accessories. Time will tell.